Sunday, October 9, 2016

I'm sitting in front of a crackling campfire here under the infinite starry canopy of the southern skies in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, listening to the yips of nearby spotted hyenas (the same guys who ransacked our camp garbage can last night, aided by a lone brown hyena), contemplating the past month of memorable travel here in Botswana, but also trying to recollect the details of our last three weeks in Zambia back in August. It seems slightly incongruous to be sitting beside a campfire feeling like a San hunter-gatherer while simultaneously typing on a laptop, but such is the life of the 21st century travel blogger.

Lusakan Lassitude

The second half of our Zambian
travels began with three days in Lusaka (August 8-10). These three days were far less carefree and
relaxing than our sojourn a month earlier had been, as I had to spend large
chunks of two days trying to remedy our lack of a Customs Import Permit for
Stanley. We had failed to get one when
we entered from Malawi, and by the time we got to Lusaka, we were long
overdue. The bureaucrats at the Zambia
Revenue Agency hemmed and hawed and dragged things out, but finally managed to
get the relevant papers processed after soul-destroying hours of waiting for a
bribe of US$ 30 (the initial request was for US$ 100, but the official seemed
pleased with the smaller amount).
Unfortunately the TIP was only valid for 15 days, meaning that we would
have to renew it before we left the country, but at least we weren’t illegal
anymore. We also helped Rob, a volunteer
who was going to help out in Livingstone at the Olive Tree Learning Centre,
change money at the Bank of China’s Lusaka office; he had been working in
China, and a combination of bad luck and bad timing meant that he had arrived
in Zambia with only Chinese yuan as spending money, a currency not accepted
anywhere in Livingstone. He returned to
Livingstone on the bus with a sewing machine in his luggage for Olive Tree to
use in income-generating activities.

Pachyderm paunch: our resident elephant at Mayukuyuku

Our last day was spent by me
trying to get some niggling issues fixed on Stanley: our reverse lights weren’t working (we had
been fined for that by the police in Zimbabwe), and our rear differential lock
wasn’t working either; as well I wanted our tires rotated, and our emergency
brake and rear brakes needed to be tightened up. Mr. Mzinga, the mechanic who had worked on
Stanley in July, spent the day working on him again, this time out at his
workshop in a hardscrabble community out on the outskirts of town. In the end everything except the diff lock
got fixed; that required a switch that could not be obtained.

My friend Nathalie arrived back
in Lusaka in the middle of our stay; it was great to see her and catch up on
happenings. Once again we stayed at her
house, although the last couple of nights there were extra people staying at
Nathalie’s, friends of her colleague Vicky, so we slept out in Stanley in her
parking lot instead. We had a great
evening of Indian food with Vicky and her friends (back from a month-long road
trip through Botswana and Namibia) and Nathalie at Dil’s, a Lusaka institution
that has pictures of George W. Bush eating there a few years ago.

Patient queues of voters in Lusaka's outskirts on August 11

Underwhelmed by
Kafue

Defassa waterbuck in Kafue: note solid white rumps

On August 11th we
drove out of Lusaka late in the morning after a sluggish start. It was election day, the culmination of a
long and acrimonious campaign between the incumbent, Edward Lungu (whose
campaign T-shirts we had obtained a few days earlier in Shiwa Ngandu, and whose
campaign kept crossing paths with us in the north of the country) and the
perpetual challenger Hikainde Hichilema. We drove west
out of town along a good road, past long queues of voters waiting patiently for
their chance to exercise their democratic franchise. It all seemed fairly well organized and
cheerful and normal. We drove west for
270 km towards Kafue National Park, one of the largest and best-known parks in
Zambia. It’s so big that it’s actually
hard to get to some of the best areas (like the Basanga Plains in the north,
which has no budget accommodation options anywhere within a 3-hour driving
radius)), so we restricted ourselves to a small section near the main highway
and stayed at Mayukuyuku Camp, right on the Kafue River about 10 km off the highway.

Puku, Kafue National Park

Egret in the sunset, Mayukuyuku

Mayukuyuku was a very pleasant
place to stay, with a resident elephant who made life interesting at times, and
lots of waterbirds and hippos in the river.
We had wonderful sunsets both nights, and on the 12th we went
out for a game drive on the local trails.
To be honest, this section of Kafue was a bit underwhelming, with not
much game to be seen. We had heard that
Kafue is a great place to see cheetahs, but we saw no sign of them. In fact we didn’t see any large predators at
all. There were plenty of puku, the
red-flanked antelope that is like a burlier version of the ubiquitous impala, as
well as the impala itself. We spotted a
Defassa waterbuck as well, a subspecies of the common waterbuck without the
usual white ring on its rear end. We had
a great dinner of lamb, corn and sweet potatoes and I sat out under the stars
playing guitar late into the evening.

Lichtenstein's hartebeest

The next morning we drove out
along the main highway west towards Mongu, passing through the centre of the
national park. On the way we saw more
Defassa waterbuck and a new species for us, Lichtenstein’s hartebeest, as well
as wooly-necked storks and spur-winged geese.
Overall, though, I didn’t think Kafue was worth the effort and expense
(about US$ 180 for the two of us to camp two nights and spend two days in the
park), as it didn’t offer much game that we hadn’t already seen elsewhere, and
since (outside the camps) persistent tsetse flies mean that you have to keep
your windows rolled up on the vehicle. I
think that if we had given Kafue more time and had gotten further into the
interior, we might have found it more impressive, but we didn’t.

Wallowing Through
Liuwa Plain

At the pontoon ferry to Liuwa Plain

We ended up driving 424 km that
day, all the way to Liuwa Plain National Park, along a generally excellent road
(with one fairly awful section just outside the boundaries of Kafue). We
bought fuel and restocked our fridge in Mongu’s huge new Shoprite, and then
drove out of town along a brand-new road to Kalabo, a remarkable feat of
engineering that cost over US$200 million to build. It cuts what had once been 8 hours of
grinding through deep sand along miserable tracks and through alarming river
crossings to 50 minutes of driving pleasure, along the Barotse Plains, the
floodplains that border the Zambezi River as it flows south from its sources in
the northwestern tip of Zambia and in the Angolan highlands. We were in Kalabo by 4:30 pm, getting our park
permits for Liuwa Plain.

Stanley on the Liuwa Plain

This (formerly) remote park is
administered by African Parks, the same private trust that runs the Bangweulu
Wetlands as well as parks in Rwanda and the DRC. We paid our money (US$ 200 for three nights
and two days in the park, including camping), caught the hand-pulled cable
pontoon ferry across the river and set off for our first campsite. It took us only 200 metres to get stuck the
first time in deep, deep sand, although a small posse of local villagers soon
pushed us clear again after some energetic digging. It was the deepest sand we had seen since
long ago in Paindane, Mozambique, and it was a foretaste of what was to come
over the next few days. We got to Kayala
campsite, two kilometres from the ferry, had a fiery sunset, and popped the
roof on Stanley. We had a great show in
the evening sky as all five classical planets were visible: Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn (in
order from lowest to highest in the sky) were all in the western half of the
heavens. It felt good to be completely
alone on the plain; there were no other campers (the entire park gets only
about 500 visitors a year) and the campsite caretaker was away at a funeral.

Liuwa Plain sundowners

Terri at the wheel

We slept well and awoke at 7,
just after sunrise. We had a delicious
breakfast of oatmeal, then packed up and headed further north into the park by
9 o’clock. It was a seriously difficult
stretch of sand driving, with minimal signs, deep soft sand and a confusing
spider’s web of interlinked tracks requiring split-second decisions about which
fork in the “road” to take. Stanley bucked and swayed alarmingly as we drove
along the rutted tracks, bouncing alternately to each side. We got seriously
stuck twice, involving lots of digging by me followed by pushing while Terri
tried to drive out of the sand trap.
Just after our second escape, we were grinding through the sand when
there was a sudden loud crunch under the car.
We thought at first that we had hit a hidden rock, but there are no
rocks to hit, so we got out to see what was wrong. A small drip underneath turned out to be the
air conditioning (like all AC, it drips slightly with condensation on the
outside), so we started to drive again, but there were still horrible grinding
noises from under the car. Further
investigation showed that one of the rear shocks had sheared off the bolt that
attaches it to the leaf springs, and the shock was now hanging loose and
useless below the car. I crawled
underneath and removed the bolt that was attaching the top of the shock to the
chassis, threw the mangled shock into the back and we continued along our
way. After two hours of intense
concentration, grinding along in 4WD low range, we had covered about 25 km and
arrived at Kwale campsite, where we cooked up bacon, eggs and tomatoes on toast
and contemplated our next move.

Stanley breaks a shock

We had a reservation for a more
distant campsite, Katoyana, for that evening, and were scheduled to spend the
second night at Kwale, but given the broken shock and how slowly we were
moving, we decided that it would be best to stay the night at Kwale. Talking to the friendly campsite attendant,
we learned that about 20 km away, at Matamanene camp, there was a mechanic who
might be able to help us with the shock.
We set off early in the afternoon and had another miserable drive,
getting stuck again and struggling to make headway in the deep sand. At least we had bird life to look at: crowned cranes and wattled cranes, both
fairly rare and endangered, were out on the plain; we had seen them in Bangweulu,
but we had lost the photos when my camera card malfunctioned, so it was nice to
get photos of them again. There was also
a korhaan (a smaller version of the bustard) and lots of herds of zebras,
although domestic cattle from the local villagers living in the park were
definitely displacing the zebras near the villages.

We finally arrived at Matamanene
at 4 o’clock to find that there was no mechanic. We talked with Dan, the young Dutch biologist
who runs the Liuwa Plain Carnivore Project, who gave us the name of a good
mechanic in Mongu and said that we wouldn’t damage Stanley further by driving
without the shock. We thanked him and
set off back towards Kwale along a more direct track. We were finally out of the dense forest that
we had been in since the ferry crossing and got out onto the open plains for
which Liuwa is known. Every year in
about November the second-biggest gathering of wildebeest in the world takes
place here as the rainy season starts in earnest. The wildebeest gather from the highlands of
Angola and areas in Zambia outside the park, where they spend most of the year. We had heard that we wouldn’t see the big
wildebeest herds, but that we should see lots of hyenas and other game. As we drove along the track (still sandy, but
not as soft and deep as before, so we could actually make forward progress),
trying to navigate back to Kwale using vague directions from Dan and his
employees and minimal help from our temperamental GPS, we saw a few lone male
wildebeest here and there, more zebras and, just before dusk, one lone
hyena. Sunset found us still 12 km from
Kwale, so we decided to sleep out on the plain rather than pushing on through
the dark. It was a memorable night under
the stars, after a beautiful sunset, and we got into bed in Stanley fairly
early as we heard the yipping of hyenas around us in the dark.

Crested and wattled cranes

We woke up the next morning to an
unusual sound, like someone clapping their hands together very, very
quickly. It took a while to locate the
source, which proved to be the Eastern clapper lark, a bird which displays
every morning by clapping its wings together, first on the ground (where we
didn’t see them, hidden in the grass) and then in the air, flying steeply
upwards for a good clapping session, before gliding back to the ground. We cooked up a hearty pancake breakfast to
give us energy for more sand digging, then drove back to Kwale via a few
seasonal waterholes that were listed (with their GPS co-ordinates) in our
excellent Bradt guide to Zambia. It’s
been a very dry year in Zambia (and most of southern Africa), so the waterholes
were mostly dry. We had a good morning
of watching wattled cranes: they really are
magnificent birds, especially in flight.
Our GPS had another bad morning, sending us in random directions and
even losing track of where south was, but we eventually got back to Kwale and
set up camp under the shade of some tall trees.

Bathroom bats, Kwale campsite

We ended up spending the rest of
the day in camp. We couldn’t face more
sand driving, and there was plenty of birdlife to be seen in the woods. The campsite looked out over the open plain,
but there was almost no mammal life to be seen; I think that if we had managed
to drive further north, as was the original plan, we would have seen more
animals, but as it was, it was slim pickings.
The camp was a pleasant place to spend time, though; we were the only
inhabitants, other than the friendly caretaker, and we took advantage of the
hot showers to wash off the thick layer of sand that covered most of our
bodies, meeting the resident bats that hung upside down beneath the shower
roof. We cooked up a big chicken curry
over the campfire, letting it simmer all afternoon into a delicious thick
sauce. I went for an afternoon run
across the plain, keeping a wary eye out for lions (there are very few in the
park) and not seeing much wildlife in the grasslands. Another pretty sunset was followed by some
fruitless spotlighting for nocturnal birds; we could hear owls and nightjars,
but could not find them.

Villagers on the move across Liuwa Plain

Spot the "road": on the way back to the ferry

The next morning we woke up to
find the enormous footprints of a male lion that had wandered through in the
night (making me feel less clever for having gone running the previous afternoon!),
breakfasted on oatmeal, then drove back to the ferry crossing. It was easier going, as we chose a better
track than the first time, but there were still long sections of tough sand
slogging that Terri handled with aplomb.
Along the way we passed local villagers trekking towards the ferry in
long caravans of ox-carts, dressed in colourful clothing that contrasted
picturesquely with the golden grass.
Within two hours we were back at the ferry, without having had to dig
ourselves out once. It was an
indescribably relief to reinflate the tires from their 1.0 bar half-flat
condition so necessary in soft sand to 3.0 bars and then drive back onto
asphalt. We drove back to Mongu along
the lovely new road, bought some food at Shoprite, utterly failed to find the
mechanic recommended by Dan the carnivore man, and drove off towards
Livingstone with one missing rear shock.

Made it! Stanley waits for the pontoon

Overall Liuwa Plain was
interesting, but didn’t quite live up to its hype. I found it more interesting than Kafue, and
seeing the wattled cranes was a big bonus, but the difficulty of driving in the
deep sand, coupled with the lack of much game to see, made it not such a
compelling place to visit. My favourite
parts of the visit were the night spent out on the plain, and the afternoon in
Kwale camp. I think that Liuwa Plain
would be worth visiting later in the season, and with a lightly loaded, more
powerful 4x4 like a Land Cruiser or a Pajero.
Stanley definitely struggled with the conditions!

Zipping down the
Zambezi

Lovely barbecue spot overloking the Zambezi

It was an easy drive south along
the Zambezi on a brand-new asphalt road in perfect condition. It is such a new road that it doesn’t appear
on our Tracks 4 Africa GPS map, which spent much of the trip complaining that
we were off the road; the old road ran on the right bank of the river, but we
zipped along the left bank, bypassing towns that were on our map and making
great time. At 3:40 we crossed a new
bridge across the Zambezi and found a new campsite, the Sioma River Camp, to
spend the night.

Zambezi sunset in Sioma

It is perched high above
the Zambezi, which here runs through a steep-sided gorge on its way downstream
from the Ngonye Falls. There was a
lovely swing seat in the garden to lounge on, and a barbecue platform perched
out over the river that was the perfect sunset-viewing spot. It was one of those unexpectedly lovely
places that is always a pleasure to stumble upon.

Ngonye Falls

The next day, Wednesday August 17th,
was going to be our last day of driving for a while, as we were bound for
Livingstone. We stopped in to see the
Ngonye Falls: they’re pleasant enough,
but don’t hold a candle to the majesty of Victorial Falls. We were in and out of the falls before the
ticket man showed up late for work, saving us the admission price. Most waterfalls in Zambia are classed as
national monuments, meaning US$15 per person, plus a similar amount per
vehicle, but I think that Ngonye Falls is run by the local government, so it
might be cheaper. The local council got
its own back, though, a few kilometres down the highway where they run an
extortion racket, extracting 65 kwacha (US$ 6.50) for any foreign vehicles that
pass their roadblock. Terri was incensed
by this legalized highway robbery; it’s a good thing that other local councils
around the country don’t follow suit, or you wouldn’t be able to afford driving
down the road. It’s not a road toll, per
se; it’s just a tourist levy to cross the territory controlled by the municipal
council of Sioma.

The rest of the drive south was
uneventful, passing through some very pretty countryside indeed, until the town
of Sesheke, where the road runs into the Namibian border. From that point to the Botswanan border town
of Kazungula, the asphalt of the road has disintegrated entirely, meaning that
it takes three hours of careful navigating between car-sized potholes to drive
the 130 km on this stretch, with the central 85 km being particularly
awful. At Kazungula the pavement
returned to its usual immaculate state and we cruised into the familiar
surroundings of Livingstone, where we had spent three weeks back in March. We went straight to our favourite restaurant,
Olga’s, for a celebratory lunch, then contemplated where to stay. We knew that we would end up spending most of
our stay at Jollyboy’s Campsite, but we wanted one night out of town. We looked at the Waterfront, but its campsite
was heaving with no fewer than seven overland trucks, as peak tourist season
was upon us. We found a much quieter
spot at Maramba River Camp, then went out for sundowners at the Royal
Livingstone, Terri’s favourite place in all of Livingstone. It was good to be back in our familiar home
away from home.

Happy at the Royal Livingstone

Lingering in
Livingstone

Stanley, Terri and some OTLC pupils and staff

Volunteer family extraordinaire: Jo and Rob and their 5 children

Digging the new latrines

The next two weeks passed by
remarkably quickly. Rob and Jo, Terri’s
friends from New Zealand, were in Livingstone to volunteer at the Olive Tree
Learning Centre, and Jo did a lot of work on the fund-raising website for the
school, deploying her impressive graphic arts and web design skills on the
project. Rob and their five children
worked both at OLTC and at another school most mornings, playing with children
and doing physical labour on the ongoing construction at OTLC. Sadly, their volunteering stint was curtailed
by a thief who managed to steal a huge sum of Chinese yuan cash from their
hotel room; since that money was their travel money, they ended up changing
their plane tickets to return to New Zealand early, a big loss both to them and
to the OTLC project. Apparently it was
the fifth case of theft at that same lodge in less than a month, making it
likely that it was an inside job either by the owner or by an employee.

The heart of any good school--OTLC inaugurates its new library

It was good to see the changes at
OTLC since we left town in early April.
The new school building that was paid for by fundraising efforts at
Terri’s former school, the Kumon Leysin Academy in Switzerland (KLAS), is now complete;
the last windows and door gates went into place while we were there, along with
electrical fittings. Terri spent a lot
of time huddled with the school’s business manager, going over accounts and
trying to set the school on a path to financial sustainability, since KLAS will
end its decade-long tradition of sending a student humanitarian service trip to
Livingstone. It was good to see the
school expanding and moving in new directions, with the sewing machine and some
donated computers being deployed in income-generating activities, and new
teachers joining the fold. Jo gave a great professional development session to the teachers. We broke ground on new latrines for the students, and inaugurated the library, a sorely needed resource in a community virtually without access to books. We even watched a partial solar eclipse one morning while working on the new sandpit for the schoolyard. There is an
air of progress and optimism in meeting new challenges that is heartening to
see, particularly for Terri who has spent the past decade cultivating the
skills of the people who run the school.
We spent some time setting up a sponsorship program to allow people to
sponsor a child for a year at the school; taking photos of the children, and
writing up their biographies, I realized again how lucky I have been in my own
life, being born where I was, when I was to the parents that I have.

The boss gets her hands dirty during OTLC construction

I won the genetic lottery; some of these
students did not, and OTLC represents a chance to give these young minds a bit
more of a head start. The project has
been going for long enough that Terri can start to get positive feedback about
how well her pupils do after they leave OTLC and move into government primary
schools. It’s been a rewarding
experience for me to play a small part in this project, and I look forward to
doing so again in the future. I think
Terri can be proud of the help that she has given to children in a tough
neighbourhood of Livingstone.

Rob putting his back into construction at OTLC

Jo giving some tech professional development to OTLC teachers

Spaces between leaves make pinhole images of the eclipsed sun

Our time in Livingstone wasn’t
all work and no play. We found time to
go whitewater rafting, and it was an exciting full-day trip down some pretty
big rapids indeed. Neither Terri nor I
went overboard, although one of our raft-mates did, while one of the other
rafts flipped completely and it was some very shaken, scared rafters that we
helped to pull out of the river downstream.

Yes, that's an anti-malarial bednet being used as a fishing net!

We also went abseiling and hiking in a side canyon of the Zambezi while
other, braver folks hurled themselves off the Gorge Swing. I found a tennis court and a tennis partner,
Darlington, and spent several happy afternoons playing. The courts were in terrible condition, and
the tennis balls were worse, but it was so much fun, good for my soul. I got out running most afternoons, and we
spent several evenings having sundowners at the Royal Livingstone, watching the
sun turn the Zambezi various incredible shades of copper and gold.

Terri abseiling outside Livingstone

Kids enjoying the new sandpit at OTLC

We met interesting people staying
at the campsite as well. The cyclists of the Joburg2Kili charity ride kept us amused for a few days when we first got to Livingstone.

Tbe Joburg2Kili cycling team

The new school building at OTLC

Justin, our builder, finishing off the windows

Maya (the Land Rover), Cristelle and Terri

Cristelle, a
French woman who has been travelling and working on various small-scale
humanitarian projects for several years in Africa, in her trusty Land Rover
named Maya, was a source of great information and inspiration. Douglas and Keira, an Irish couple in another
Land Rover, gave us lots of tips for our trip through Botswana and South
Africa. And the teachers and students of
the Travelling School, a 16-student, 4-teacher high school semester abroad
program that moves through Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa over the
course of 4 months, gave Terri and me inspiration to think about setting up a
similar program ourselves in the future; we’ve spent numerous nights around the
campfire talking about it.

Child labour: photogenic pupil Shawn hard at work

We also had some work done on
Stanley, getting the rear shocks replaced (it was a long process, as the right
shocks were not to be found and other shocks needed to be modified to fit our
Colt) and trying to repair the rear differential lock (the right switch could
not be found). We extended both our
visas and our CIP for Stanley (remarkably, both were free of charge and
involved little bureaucracy and no demands for bribery, a welcome change from
other encounters with the Zambia Revenue Authority). And then, suddenly, it was September 2nd
and we were driving to the Botswana border crossing at Kazungula, keen to head
into the wildlife centre of Africa. It
had been a wonderful five weeks in Zambia, but it was time to move on to fresh
adventures.